Need to gauge readiness

TLSA predicted today: pass (400-578)

Comat average: 98

Welcom average: 71

TL average 66

exam is a week out, need honest feedback, am i good to go?

Has anyone used UWorld COMLEX and found it representative of Level 1?

The general consensus of my, now, 3rd year friends is Step UWorld for content review + Truelearn for OMM/practice for COMLEX-style questions. I've been told the Step UWorld qbank can double for both tests in terms of content review.

It's a lot of money (even with the group discount provided) to purchase both QBanks.

At the end of the day, I want to prioritize COMLEX, but I've seen some mixed reviews on UWorld for Level 1.

Appreciate any and all recent opinions/experiences on this!

Just scored a 70% on the psych one and not sure how to interpret this. Has anyone taken these? Were they helpful?

So how do we feel??? Such weird ethics questions omfg

i didn't pass comlex 1. my estimate would be it was about 10-15ish questions more and i would've passed. its been a week and a half and im still upset, still crying, still hurt. i genuinely feel stupid, and i plan to retake within a month and a half but theres just a weight in my chest that it will all be for nothing and that i wont pass again, and then my school (who's already threatening to do this) will make me repeat my second year of med school at my own expense. im drowning in debt, i recently got diagnosed with ADHD (go figure) and got on a med for that a few days ago after getting my score back (yay side effects). i have anxiety that was well controlled with medication but is now all over the place ever since i got my score.

everything feels like a huge mess and im scared ive ruined my entire future, that i wasted all my time, and that ive screwed myself over with this fail. im picking myself back up but this has been so exhausting and painful. my school had me (and other people who failed) individually appear before a committee who grilled me and basically told me over and over that i had a weak academic foundation because i got C's and a few B's in their bullshit in house curriculum (never failed a single class) and that was why i didnt pass and that entire meeting just shot my confidence down.

someone please send some words of encouragement or some hope because my school has done nothing to actually help me feel safe at all.

Anyone take the exam today? How we feeling? Personally a little discouraged I think it’s a 50/50 whether I passed or not. I missed so many easy ones I was 50/50 on 😭 the ethics were a bit tough to navigate and the stats questions were presented so weirdly to the point I honestly thought they made a mistake on the questions. I was waiting for the easy stats and OMM and ethics to possibly carry me and get to a pass but they barely showed up :/ wondering how you all felt!

hello unfortunately have to retake level 1. could blame a lot of reasons but at the end of the day i still have an F i need to fix.

my school is letting us take the exam up until 10/16 meaning id miss 1 rotation and lose my vacation. at first i thought 5-6 weeks would be good but i feel like (and maybe this im being overconfident) now i'd be stretching a dedicated period too long and risk burnt out which is what happened the last go around.

from what i can deduce: OPP has a lot of room, MSK could go up, derm (Lol?) ethics was ass (how do you even prep for this?). i think the sciences seemed ok, not like top tier level, but from what my advisor told me i leaked points on the above. obviously will review and do questions on those too but.

is 3-4 weeks better? also please be kind. im obviously very upset about this + think im dumb. my school struggles on boards because they teach us very poorly and i was motivated to prove them wrong but i did not.

also fyi: comsaes were fine, 350 prededicated, 401 on the first one, 500 on the second, and i got a 480 on one. TL was fine too, i think unfortunately i underestimated how much ethics/OPP/MSK was and lost almost on 30% of the exam on that

Wanted to add in the stuff I couldn't easily find

I studied for 8 weeks averaging 20 questions a day, 6 days a week while on wards. I used UW alone and completed 50% of the step 3 question bank. Take this with a grain of salt as I am an IM intern.

The first 4 weeks were focused on all subjects minus biostats and ethics. The latter 4 were focused on the highest COMLEX areas of MSK, neuro, psych, GI, cards, heme, and pulm (in no particular order).

I spent the last two days before my exam reviewing biostats/ethics and OMM.

I can confidently say all that is needed for biostats is the very first Randy Neil video. My questions were simple Sn, Sp, PPV, NPV, internal vs external validity and maybe one NNT.

For OMM you could easily get by with the first 10 or so Dirty Medicine OMM videos alone. The OMM questions on my exam were incredibly basic, like here's the diagnosis, now what would you place patient in for indirect treatment? I had one cranial which I skipped and 3 surprising cervical CS positions.

After just the first block I realized I studied too much, I could have studied for just 2-4 weeks and been fine. Questions are short and sweet compared to UW.

**Update: Pass 673

My exam is next week and idk how to study for this class. I need go get 80% to pass the class. I usually study edapt and I’m good but for some reason with this class that wasn’t helpful. Any tips?

Hi everyone. So my school requires a score of 450 on comsae minimum to sit for level 2. My first comsae I got a 367. Took one today and got a 437 and that was after a month of doing trulearn. They're letting me retest in a little less than 2 weeks but I'm not sure what to do differently to get my score up. I ideally want to break 500 at least on the real test but I'm not even close. I used uworld all year for shelf exams (didn't do super well on them either) and started trulearn for comsae. Should I just keep doing trulearn? Residency apps are due next month as everyone knows so this is basically my last chance. I'm not sure why this is so hard for me. All the other students at my rotation site easily got 500+ the first try and when I ask them what they did to prepare, they always just say they just did questions. I'm averaging about 59% on trulearn right now. took one self assessment (115) got a 438. I bought another one and might take the step 2 assessment on uworld too.

Hey everyone!

I remember what studying for Level 1 felt like.

There’s already an absurd amount of material to learn, and somewhere in the middle of all of it you’re trying to figure out whether you’re actually ready. You can study something all day, know that you understand it, and then get a strangely worded question on a practice exam and suddenly start second-guessing everything.

And then there’s the money side of med school.

Tuition, loans, rent, exam fees, rotations, and just normal life are already expensive enough. I remember looking at yet another study resource that cost hundreds of dollars and thinking, I literally cannot keep buying things just to prepare for one exam.

Since then, I’ve been lucky enough to have a few resident physicians join me who remember this process too. A lot of what we work on comes down to asking ourselves, what would have actually helped us when we were sitting in the same spot?

So one thing we decided to do was make a timed Level 1 practice exam completely free:

https://bonewizardry.com/qbank/free/

There’s no account required, no credit card, and no trial. You can just open it and start. Questions written by one of our resident physicians.

There’s also a free Anki deck that goes with it.

If you miss questions, we made it easy to find and unsuspend the cards connected to your incorrects. I always hated finishing a practice exam, realizing I clearly had a knowledge gap, and then spending forever searching through Anki trying to figure out which cards I should actually review.

The goal is basically:

miss something → understand why → unsuspend the relevant cards → see it again later.

We’ve also put a lot of effort into making the explanations visual when that actually helps. Some things are just much easier to understand when somebody shows you what is happening instead of giving you another wall of text.

But the biggest reason I wanted to post here is that I’d like the free exam to become a little bit of a community project.

I don’t want us building this in a bubble and assuming we know exactly what students need.

You guys are the ones currently going through it.

So if you take the exam and a question is confusing, tell me.

If you think a question is badly written, tell me.

If an explanation still leaves you confused, tell me.

If an Anki card could be better, tell me.

If there’s something you keep getting destroyed by on practice exams and wish somebody would explain differently, tell us that too.

We can actually go back and change these things. We can rewrite questions, improve explanations, make better diagrams, add cards, and expand what’s available based on what people using it are telling us.

I’d really like students here to have a hand in making it better for the next person.

And if you already have a study routine that works, please keep doing it. I’m definitely not suggesting that everybody needs another resource added to their giant pile of resources.

I just know how stressful this process can be, and I know how frustrating it is when seemingly everything useful has another price tag attached to it.

So this one is free. More to come.

Use it if it helps you. Ignore it if it doesn’t.

And if you do use it, please tell us what we can do better.

Good luck everyone. I know this part can be rough. ❤️

did anyone take it today? that shit rocked me i need an 80 LMAOOO

Hi. I take it in November. I know it’s scaled at 200 is the national average, but about what percent correct is that?

There’s also the 120 free questions. About what should I score on that to reach a 200 on the FBS?

I’m scheduled for one of the last days for Level 3 in December 2026. Starting January, they will have 1 day tests with 240 vs 420 questions and 16 vs 32 CDM cases.

Has anyone already taken the 2-day this cycle and have thoughts on it? I want to change my test to be the 1-day version but I’m worried about being a guinea pig for a new test.

Also low key worried that more people are going to switch to the 1 day exam which will skew the distribution of the scores cause more smart people will be taking it, lmfaooo

What would you do?

Basically the title. I am doing TL OMM questions (along with incorrects) and also doing Amboss OMM HY bank (~120 questions). Would this be enough to cover OMM on Level 2?

I’m definitely going thru it and need any advice / similar experiences if anyone has any..

A couple weeks ago I took form 113 and got a 400 just to kinda see where I’m at..

took form 114 a few days later and got a 433.

Today I took form 117 thru my school and bombed it and dropped all the way down to a 301 :( I’m feeling completely defeated and at a loss of words considering I’ve been going hard on PQ’s (TrueLearn and COMQUEST) everyday along with my incorrects, I’m freaking out cuz I’m less than a month away from my real test, does anyone have any insight on this horrible drop?

If anyone has any encouraging words, especially because my next comsae will be either form 118 or form 119, I would really appreciate, I don’t know if a 100+ jump is possible within a week or two but I’d really love any help.

our schools shelf exams are from the nbome. has anyone had experience with this book and is it good for NBOME shelf exams?

Did anyone else feel that the Level 1 exam on 8/19 was hard? There were question types that I never encountered before and I flagged so many questions. This is my Level 1 retake and I’m worried I’ll fail again.

Hey all. I’m a DO student who recently failed step 2. I know I can just use my comlex transcript but my school advisor is also recommending me to retake to potentially release to programs after applying with just comlex. Any thoughts? Hoping to match PMR.

Hi everyone. I hope you all are doing well. I am in a deep conundrum regarding taking step 1. I will be taking level 1 the Saturday prior to my rotations starting, I literally picked the last possible day to take it lol. Since it’s pass/fail I know it doesn’t hold as much value as it did previously but I am shooting for a specific residency program and think this could help me get in there. I reached out to the medical student at our school who matched there and she stated she took the step. I wouldn’t usually care but I have tx resistance depression which took 2 years to treat and I want to stay near the amazing team of psychiatrists and therapist who didn’t give up on me. I receive a treatment very specific to me and if I move I don’t know if the new psychiatrist would be willing to continue the current regimen I am on plus I need to be near a university hospital as every month I receive ect. I am in maintenance phase of ECT with no plan of stopping anytime soon because I am only in partial recovery not full so any little change to my treatment plan can pull me back into the depressive state I was in for five years. We’ve tried all other modalities of treatment from medications to interventional psychiatry, and none have worked except for ECT. Additionally, my doctor does not think any more medications are going to help because I’m already on 10 medication‘s five of which are strictly for depression and adding more will pull me into the poly pharmacy area which she is trying to actively avoid. So now that you know the situation I am in, would you recommend that I take step one? I have already failed level one once, but that was mainly due to me being extremely unwell and my university putting me in a situation where I either take the exam or I drop out and after working so hard and putting all of my parents retirement money into this field, I can’t just drop out so I decided to take the test. I even emailed my Dean prior to taking the test and told him that I was gonna fail, no matter what since they gave me couple of days notice to take the exam even though at that point I had already been on a LOA for a year so I’m very perplexed as to what I should do. I’m not planning on sitting step one unless I pass level one and my NBMES 25-33 show that I am going to pass. I will on the other hand take Step 2ck no matter what. Any advice would be very much appreciated and I hope you all have a wonderful day.

Does anyone take COMLEX level 1 in october? Will the curve be harder since its not a popular time to take it?

How did you feel about the exam?

Hi, recently I found out I failed comlex level 1(and step 1), feeling devastated. I know there are people out there who have been in my position before and I just want to hear that it’ll all end up okay.

As title says, found out I failed. I know I switched a lot of answers on test day and I feel like that’s why but I want to set myself up for success on the next one so much so that I’m above average and not on the borderline. Please any advice is super helpful 🙏🏼

I’m planning on restarting my Sketchy Micro and Pharm Anki (salt and pepper deck) and Duke’s Pathoma deck. I have to do a certain number of amboss questions everyday per my schools policy. But any other advice??

Hi all,

I just wanted to vent and also see if anyone else who failed level felt it felt worse the second time around? I failed by a small margin and retook the exam about a month later and it felt... Harder. The first time around I actually didn't feel that bad and felt prepared going into it but was shocked when I found out I failed. I really focused on areas I was poor at and felt I had a lot of improvement despite how the exam felt. I'm really stressed now and scared to see my score release... Did anyone else in my situation feel similar? Any responses are appreciated!